Posted December 15, 2012
Hi everyone,
I have written a little tool that let's Imperialism use less CPU.
Usually the game occupies one entire cpu core (check it with the Windows Taskmanager). However it is an old game that does not need all that much - but still takes everything it can get. I didn't really like that because my dual-core laptop gets quite hot under load, switches on the fan, and sucks the battery faster.
The tool consists of an EXE and a DLL. I uploaded pre-build binaries to github:
https://github.com/vobject/mfc-slowdown/blob/master/build/slowdown_20121215.zip?raw=true
Extract the Dll and Exe into the games installation folder, next to Imperialism.exe. Instead of starting Imperialism.exe, you now start slowdown.exe - this will automatically start the game, but make it behave nicer on the CPU. The slowdown.exe does require administrator privileges, just like the original Imperialism.exe file (sorry, but nothing I can do).
If you experience any kind of problems please report them here, on github, or just delete the files and use the original Imperialism.exe again. If it works, check the CPU percentage of the Imperialism process again - it should be much lower now.
I successfully tested it with a 2.4Ghz Core2Duo and a Phenom X6.
You can also find the source code on github - but it is really nothing fancy:
https://github.com/vobject/mfc-slowdown
Best regards
I have written a little tool that let's Imperialism use less CPU.
Usually the game occupies one entire cpu core (check it with the Windows Taskmanager). However it is an old game that does not need all that much - but still takes everything it can get. I didn't really like that because my dual-core laptop gets quite hot under load, switches on the fan, and sucks the battery faster.
The tool consists of an EXE and a DLL. I uploaded pre-build binaries to github:
https://github.com/vobject/mfc-slowdown/blob/master/build/slowdown_20121215.zip?raw=true
Extract the Dll and Exe into the games installation folder, next to Imperialism.exe. Instead of starting Imperialism.exe, you now start slowdown.exe - this will automatically start the game, but make it behave nicer on the CPU. The slowdown.exe does require administrator privileges, just like the original Imperialism.exe file (sorry, but nothing I can do).
If you experience any kind of problems please report them here, on github, or just delete the files and use the original Imperialism.exe again. If it works, check the CPU percentage of the Imperialism process again - it should be much lower now.
I successfully tested it with a 2.4Ghz Core2Duo and a Phenom X6.
You can also find the source code on github - but it is really nothing fancy:
https://github.com/vobject/mfc-slowdown
Best regards
Post edited December 15, 2012 by vobject
